And, just to clarify for those who didn’t click the link, that’s gap in usage. So Russia still shoots twice as many shells than Ukraine, but it’s getting closer. Article doesn’t mention if that’s because Ukraine has more shells available or if Russia shoots less, I’d guess it’s because of both.

losing 1380 personnel, but only 1 tank

That’s what I’ve been following too. And additionally, based on quick’n’rough estimation from wikipedia numbers, artillery reserves are pretty much depleted too, so Russia is fighting on what ever soviet era relics they can refurbish and what they can manufacture/buy. I don’t think they’ll have short of ammunition any time soon, but diminishing numbers of barrels should start to show up on these statistics ‘in the near future’, whenever that might be.

Did they damage that target? Disable it? Destroy it?

I haven’t seen any public statistics for this, but based on my understanding, if you hit pretty much any modern tank on top hatch or some other weak spot with a javelin it’ll at least disable the tank as it pretty much melts everything inside the crew space/engine bay. Those might be repairable, but most likely not in the location.

And what Ukrainians will most likely encounter is not a modern tank, but a T-62 or some even older soviet relic, which doesn’t have active armor and those can be stopped with a good throw of molotov cocktail. So, my somewhat uneducated guess would be that every decent hit is a destroyed tank. Of course there’s missed shots, less than optimal impacts and all that, so actual number isn’t 100%, but I’d guess that it’s not far off.

And for tanks there’s also a guestion if Ukraine can even find anything to shoot at. On Ukrainian reports destroyed tanks have been in single digits per day for quite a while, so either Russia has learned on how to defend their gear or (in my opinion more likely) they just don’t have that many tanks anymore. Obviously across the whole Russia there’s a ton of relics around, starting from T-34’s from WW1, but I guess no one knows how many of those are in condition where they could even move on their own and even if they did it’s guestionable how effective those would be on todays battle field.

But javelins are still pretty neat hardware and they can easily destroy pretty much anything on the field, the only guestion is if Ukraine can get those close enough to hit anything interesting.

Unfortunately they didn’t get all of them. Russia has sent a ton of drones and missiles at the last few days, offically targeting energy infrastructure, including a dam near Kyiv.

While that might play a very small part on their strategy I don’t think anyone in Ukraine thinks twice before shooting it should the situation really need it. It would make a nice trophy, agreed, but I think the mentality is that if it doesn’t burn then nice and even if it does the charred remains are still a trophy and a big PR win via social media.

I don’t know how willing they are to give up Crimea and I suppose one of the reasons the war is happening now is that the west closed their eyes when Russia annexed areas from Ukraine. At least on the news Crimea is often described as ‘temporarily occupied’, so I think at least offically they’re targeting 1991 borders.

But yeah, it’s solely up to Ukraine, and I believe they’ll have very similar support regardless of the border, at least as long as they’re not claiming anything beyond 1991 borders from Russia.

I’m not exactly sure what happened between 1991 and 2013 around there, but I’d argue that they should have the original indepencence borders and that’s it. But it’s not my call by any stretch, Ukraine and their people are the ones who should settle where the border is.

And the global west should support their cause. Sure, it’s not particulary easy for anyone right now, but for the majority of the people in EU supporting Ukraine is financially mostly a inconvenience. You might pay a slightly bit more on your bread and butter, but currently no one is coming for you with guns, which is very much a reality in Ukraine right now.

I’ve seen my share of fire around metal and the amount of steel on those things the fire shown on the picture doesn’t do much. Of course all the plastic on hoses/wiring, seat covers and things like that, the crew obviously included, wouldn’t be fine. You obviously couldn’t just hop in and drive the thing off from that point and if your task was just to disable the tank and trust that you have the area under control so that it couldn’t be recovered for repairs any time soon, sure, the first drone would have been well enough.

I don’t really know either, but based on the videos from the lines it seems like Ukraine gladly spend few cheap drones to make absolutely sure that the things they stop won’t move again. Additionally, some models, even if their crew is dead and the engine is dead, can still autonomously respond to incoming fire (assuming of course that there’s still juice in the batteries and the weapons systems work), so that alone for me is enough to spend another drone to confirm that the thing is dead and stays that way.

It’s hard to tell. First one likely detonated on impact to the drone cage/camouflage and shaped charge possibly breached the roof from the turret and/or engine bay depending on where it actually hit. But I don’t think the “tank” part of that took too much damage. That might have been running with somewhat minor repairs and maybe an engine swap.

The second hit was between the turret and the frame next to main barrel which absoutely rendered that thing as scrap. I’d say that a single drone is pretty cheap price to verify that this particular unit isn’t coming after you ever again. Specially since Russia has very limited capabilities to produce new ones.

Guy reporting to Putin and Ukrainian chiefs have quite opposite interests to give estimations and I don’t know how accurately you can draw lines on the maps, so I’d guess that the russian guy underestimates the area by a lot in a hope that his window doesn’t suddenly break with his body and Ukraine likes to give a round number, even if reality is 830km² or whatever (I don’t believe that they’d publicly lie about the area to be 3 times bigger than actual, but 20% on those cirumstances is pretty much just a rounding error).